Impactful CEO and being kind...

Newsletter - Issue # 6

May 23, 2025

A few thoughts from me…

Last week, we published Part Two of the article What does success mean to you?

While Part One focused on those who have already become extraordinarily successful in their lives, and what success means to them (and what we can learn from them, too), Part Two examined what it should mean, realistically, to us, and why it’s so important to always clearly define it.

You can read both parts of the article here:

What does success mean to you? (Part One)

What does success mean to you? (Part Two)

What does success look like to a top business leader?

Over the years, I have met many extraordinarily successful CEOs from large organisations and diverse backgrounds. Some have been founders who have led from the front, and many have been Career Executives.

A CEO usually leads a team of senior executive managers - the C-Suite - each responsible for running distinct functions within the business. The CEO is accountable to their board of directors and often shareholders.

They are primarily responsible for developing the vision and strategy for their organisation and for making major corporate decisions. They often become the face of the business to stakeholders and the outside world.

It’s invariably a huge responsibility, accompanied by a considerable amount of pressure and stress. The risks to them, career-wise, are also very high - the buck will most often stop with them if things go wrong.

It takes a special kind of individual to be good enough to become a CEO. They invariably have to work extremely hard for long hours, and the concept of ‘work-life balance’ is often an impossible one to even contemplate!

So, what does success mean to a high-performance CEO? How do they most often define it? And when it comes to achieving fulfilment, happiness, and contentment in their lives, what are these blue-sky aspirations normally anchored to?

The most popular answer to these questions, from all those I’ve spoken to, is simply: To be able to make a real impact.

For many CEOs, the status, level of pay, and lifestyle they enjoy are often dismissed as far less important than the ‘difference they can make’ for their employees, organisation, stakeholders, and the wider world.

Their focus is far more on transformational growth, managing risk, while carrying their people with them. They understand that their own success will always be dependent on how successful they can help their team to become, and the positive culture they can influence within their organisation overall.

Success for them is typically much more fundamental than material. It’s often more values-led than ambition-led. And curiously, while most CEO’s will inevitably operate in a high-stakes, high-stress environment, they are often some of the most in-control and unstressed people that you can meet.

For me, there are valuable lessons to be learned from the lives of successful CEOs.

If we define our own personal success in terms of the impact we want to make, the positive difference we can make to people’s lives, while being true to sound values (being values-led), how can we go wrong?

Once we recognise that our success will be dependent on others as well, and we learn how to nurture those relationships while adopting a ‘give first’ mindset in doing so, we will start to attract the help we need.

None of us can ever succeed in life entirely on our own. We all need help from others.

Being kind and courteous…

Whether a business leader or whatever path we may choose to follow in our careers, being kind, considerate, and courteous to those around us is a value that will always attract appreciation and serve us well.

With the spotlight that’s been shone recently on mental health and staff well-being (also job satisfaction and staff retention) in the workplace, kindness and courtesy are being increasingly recognised today as important contributors to good work culture.

But for us to be kind and courteous to our colleagues at work, we need to start at home. We need to be kind to our family, friends, and the people around us, as well as to ourselves. It has to be something that we value so much that it becomes a value we naturally adopt.

When we are kind, we radiate a positive energy that is both good for others and healthy for ourselves. It’s a perfect win-win.

And the best thing of all? It doesn’t cost anything to be kind… Being positive consumes very little effort, too.

Parents!!! If you want to teach your kids something valuable that will help them throughout their lives, show them how to be kind and courteous. Lead by example. Inspire them. Invest in them. You will be helping your children early to develop a sound moral compass.

I will leave you with the words of the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, one of the greatest intellectual leaders of our time, and famously, one of the kindest people you could ever want to meet…

This is what he once expressed to me when we were talking about kindness and the impact we can all have on the wider world.

Just know that some little seed of greatness exists in all of us, and it does not necessarily have to be greatness in the eyes of the world.
Sometimes, one single act of kindness can redeem a life.
Sometimes, a single smile can rescue a person from loneliness and despair.
You never know what the consequences of your next act may be, but people never forget a good or kind or encouraging word or deed.
That greatness is there for each of us, and all we have to do is have the courage to respond and let it express itself in a way that only we can do, and that’s true for every single one of us.
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks – from his chapter in A Few Wise Words